I watched this documentary last night, having missed it when it played the Wisconsin Filmfest earlier this year. It’s not a great film, but it does offer a window into a particular subculture–the white working class of South Carolina. It’s also somewhat poignant, as the focus on T-Money, who started the organization “Wrestling for Jesus” after the suicide of his father. He takes his ring around to small towns in SC and a handful of guys do the moves. After the show is over, a preacher comes out for the altar call. There are rarely more than 100 people in attendance and when the camera scans their faces during the action, they often look disinterested or bored, except for the gray-haired woman who is caught shouting “Kill him!”

There is also tragedy, when the young man who was voted “most Christ-like” suffers a debilitating neck injury, and a biker-turned Jesus wrestler is diagnosed with cancer. T-Money himself has marital difficulties and eventually divorces. The “ministry” disbands, but the film ends with T-Money trying to put a new life together in a new relationship.

My closest brush with the culture of “semi-pro” wrestling in South Carolina was the American Coliseum in Spartanburg which I regularly drove past. Its signs promised excitement, was “not for boring people” and for several months advertised “twin midget wrestling.” One can only speculate

Interesting article in the Times about the use of digital mapmaking by historians.

He appeared on a Walmart receipt! In Traveler’s Rest, SC, no less (for those unfamiliar with SC, TR is just a few miles from Furman University and St. James Episcopal Church). I would make a crack about South Carolina now, but I’m disappointed that none of my Greenville friends shared this with the world and I had to learn about it from the Guardian. They provide a lovely slideshow of other appearances of Jesus; apparently he prefers appearing on toast.

I read this post on Patheos about the effects of Google’s complex algorithms on our world. It turns out that our search results are constantly being recalibrated to conform more closely to our interests. In other words, if you and I put in the same search term into Google, we might get completely different results. It’s not just the Internet, of course. We do the same with other media, including the news. Commenters have lamented for some time that some people only watch Fox News, while others restrict themselves to CNN or MSNBC.

This reality came home to me this week, when numerous Facebook friends suddenly expressed their outrage over the not-guilty verdict in the Casey Anthony trial. I had no idea what they were talking about. Who’s she, I wondered. Apparently it was the trial of the century. I missed it, and more surprisingly, I missed the entire event, from its beginning.

The Internet has allowed me to become much more selective in what I read and follow. Google Reader keeps me up to date with all of the blogs and other sites I follow, and I don’t have to go fishing for information. I read what looks interesting to me and ignore the rest. I suppose on one level that’s not so different now than it was twenty-five years ago, when I got my news from NPR, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and watched CNN only when there was some major event taking place. Still, even then I would have been aware of stories that caught the nation’s attention, even if I had little interest in it–like, say, the OJ Simpson trial.

The staff of the Times Magazine came up with their counterpart to the Guardian’s list. As Kevin Drum points out, only four of the 167 books mentioned were written before the twentieth century. Sad.